Charles de Rose, father of the art of the fighter pilot

Jean-Baptiste Marie Charles Tricornot de Rose, aka Carlo, Baron de Tricornot, Marquis de Rose, is unknown to the general public. But this inventive free spirit was the emblematic figure behind fighter aircraft, of which he was the founding father.

Born in Paris on 16 October 1876, Charles de Tricornot de Rose chose to carry on with the family tradition of taking up a military career. Indeed, for six generations the Tricornots had been cavalry officers. Admitted to Saint-Cyr in 1895, has was then assigned to the 9th Dragoon Regiment in Lunéville. The brilliant career that lay ahead of him was cut short in 1906. Carlo de Rose was arrested for refusing to expel a priest from his church in application of the law on the separation of Church and State.

Acquitted by the Council of War, he was nonetheless inactive for three years. Carlo de Rose took advantage of this difficult situation to study mechanics and internal combustion engines, even finding work at the Brillié automobile company. This experience, which was to be decisive for the rest of his career, revealed a free spirit, a man who was curious and imaginative, who understood the changes that were to lead to future technical advances. His time in limbo came to an end on 25 March 1909, when he was reinstated into the French Army.

Assigned to the 19th Dragoon Regiment in Carcassonne, Carlo de Rose nonetheless did not hesitate to volunteer at the end of the year for pilot training as General Roques was setting up the Army Aeronautical Service. He received his civilian licence from the Aéro-club in December 1910 and made a name for himself by participating in several races. Carlo de Rose had found his calling in aviation, where his inventive, energetic spirit was able to express itself to the fullest.

In pursuit of enemy aircraft

In May 1911, he was officially attached to the establishment in Vincennes where he carried out several research projects in the aviation field. De Rose undertook many experiments, performing the first aircraft artillery fire adjustments the following August. He had a passion for aircraft weaponry, and his meeting with Roland Garros in 1912 turned out to be a decisive step in this process.

When the war broke out, he was put in command of the 5th Army’s aeronautical division, and his experience was invaluable. Frantz and Quenault’s victory, shooting down a German aircraft on 5 October 1914, was clear proof for de Rose that his intuitions were justified. In March 1915, he entrusted the pilots in his unit, the MS 12, recently equipped with Morane-Saulnier planes, with a new mission: hunting down enemy aircraft and shooting them down. He thus laid down the first bases of fighter aircraft, although firing synchronisation remained a problem that worried him, but it was finally solved by Sergeant Alkan of the MS 12 in the spring of 1916 after months of hard work. His foresight convinced the high command to implement the first fighter squadrons along the front.

When the terrifying Battle of Verdun began in February 1916, one man was clearly qualified to turn around the situation, which was not then favourable for France – Commander de Rose. General Pétain entrusted him with a mission that he summed up in a now famous quote: "Rose, sweep the sky! I am blind." De Rose managed to have 15 squadrons equipped with the famous Nieuport XI airplane, called "Bébé", and brought together the best pilots including the famous Navarre, Guynemer, Brocard, Garros, Heurtaux, Nungesser, Dorme, etc. After fierce fighting, the French patrols finally managed to gain control of the airs in April.

On 11 May, during a demonstration flight south of Soissons at the commands of his Nieuport decorated with a rose, his personal insignia, Commander de Rose fell victim to an engine failure and was accidentally killed after having giving the art of the fighter pilot its credentials.

Marie-Catherine Villatoux - French Defence History Service, Air Force Department. In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 193/April 2009

"There will be no peace on this planet as long as human rights are violated somewhere in the world". Thus spoke René Cassin, the great French jurist and one of the fathers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nobody more than he had understood that human rights and peace were inextricably linked.

Descended from an old family of Jewish extraction, René Samuel Cassin was born on 5 October 1887 in Bayonne. After his brilliant studies at Lycée Masséna in Nice, he went to Law School in Aix-en-Provence. With a Licence degree in Literature, he took the first prize of the “Concours Général” of the Law Schools, became a doctor of legal sciences, economics and politics and obtained his “agrégation” degree in private law in 1919.

René Cassin was called up in 1914 as a master corporal. He was seriously wounded by machine gun fire at Saint-Mihiel on 12 October of that year. He received the War Cross with palm and the Military Medal. He was discharged and went on to teach at the university in Aix-en-Provence, then in Marseille, Lille and Paris. In solidarity with his former comrades in arms, he took part in creating one of the very first associations of war victims, in 1917. In 1929, he became the Vice-President of the High Council for wards of the state. He dedicated part of his activities to veterans until 1940 and pushed through several laws in favour of the victims of war.

As a peace activist, René Cassin sought to "erase all borders between men, affording each of them the same inalienable rights and the dignity of being". In 1924, he was a member of the French delegation to the League of Nations. After the Munich Agreement, which he condemned, he refused to take his seat in Geneva. From the early 1930s, having been warned of the dangers of Nazism by German Jews whom he had met during a trip to Palestine, he had foreseen a new conflict in Europe.

The Nobel Peace Prize for this defender of human rights

In June 1940, he refused the idea of an armistice and fled to England, presenting himself to General de Gaulle on 29 June. De Gaulle entrusted him with the mission of negotiating the agreement of 7 August 1940 with the British, an agreement that made de Gaulle a full-fledged ally and gave Free France a status that would later receive the legal and administrative structures that would ensure the continuity of the State and the Republic.

In 1943, at General de Gaulle’s request, he took on the leadership of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which he was to lead until his death. Secretary Permanent of the Defence Council of the French Empire, President of the Legal Committee of Fighting France, and then of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (1941-1944), he was named Vice-President of the Council of State in 1944, a position he held until 1960.

As France’s delegate to the UN, René Cassin was part of a small group of specialists in charge of drawing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights starting in 1946, which was adopted on 10 December 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris. He played a major role alongside the President of the Commission, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the late President of the United States; he made sure that the Declaration was "universal" and not "international", ensuring acceptance of the idea that economic, social and cultural rights are now considered as fundamental rights.

In January 1959, he was chosen by the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe to sit as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights, which he presided from 1965 to 1968. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1968; the prize money enabled him to found the International Institute of Human Rights in 1969.

René Cassin also played an active role in France’s institutional life. In 1958, he presided over the committee in charge of drawing up the Constitution of the 5th Republic and, as President of the Council of State in 1959, he swore in the new President of the French Republic, General de Gaulle. He also played an essential role in creating the Constitutional Council, of which he was a member from 1960 to 1971.

Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, Companion of the Liberation, Resistance Medal recipient, and Commander of Academic Palms, René Cassin died in Paris on 20 February 1976. His body was transferred to the Pantheon on 5 October 1987, for the centennial of his birth.

Source : In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 188/November 2008

The author of The Diary of a Country Priest joined the cavalry in August of 1914 at the age of 26. Like that of many other writers, Georges Bernanos’ work was marked by the Great War. Through his writing, he constantly sought to explore the mystery of evil while being committed to the struggle for faith and freedom.

Born in Paris in 1888, Georges Bernanos studied law and literature. A Catholic and a Royalist, he was an activist with the "Camelots du Roi". His first fictional essays were published in the press in 1913 and 1914, before being brought together in a book titled Dialogue of Shadows. While discharged in 1911, he managed to sign up again at the end of August 1914. His passion for horses and horse-riding led him to choose the cavalry. At the end of December, he joined the 6th Dragoon regiment, where he was to serve until the Armistice.

Bernanos was changed by the war. It was the ordeal that shaped his work. In a letter, he wrote "Those who cannot see the tragic side of our times, not because of a few thousand deaths, but because it marks the limit of world history, are asses."

"The ordeal of the trenches showed him the terrible grimace of modern humanity," observed Albert Béguin, literature professor, art critic and publisher whom Bernanos asked to manage his writings after his death. It was no doubt there that the tragic dimension of his work was born, with the author going, as Jean Bastier pointed out, "from a rather conventional world to the dark, cloudy skies, dirty, livid dawns and muddy, satanic lands," that can be seen in his main novels. Talking about his novel Under the Sun of Satan, which he began soon after the Armistice and was published in 1926, Bernanos himself said that it was born of the war.

In February 1915, Bernanos was in the Marne; in April he was near Verdun. In May, his division was in Picardy where part of the men were holed up in the trenches. In September, before the major offensives in Artois and Champagne, he hoped that the infantry would break through and finally enable the cavalry to ride on to victory. But the big attack was cancelled. During the following winter, the 6th Dragoons provided more detachments to the trenches. Bernanos was seriously shell-shocked during the bombardments of 1 May 1916: "Their big shells fell regularly around us, tightening their circle minute by minute, until one of them exploded right in the trench, at the height of a man, one metre away from me. What a flash of light (...) and immediately afterward, what darkness! The sparkling thing had thrown me God knows where, along with a comrade, under an avalanche of smoking dirt. The ground around us and under us was riddled with huge pieces of exploded shells (...)".

In February and March 1917, he took pilot courses at the Dijon-Longvic aviation school, then at Chartres. But as his eyesight was not considered to be good enough, he was sent back to the 6th Dragoons at the beginning of April. He nonetheless took advantage of his time away from the front to get married on 14 May 1917.

The Germans launched major offensives in the spring of 1918. Bernanos’ unit fought, on foot, in the Aisne and the Oise. On 30 May his leg was injured and he received a commendation. "I spent two days in the liaison service between my section and my company. (...). I travelled about the entire day of Thursday on a plain and in woods that were literally riddled with bullets (....). I fought like I had always dreamt of fighting."

Hospitalised in July-August, Bernanos returned to his regiment in September: "Dust, mud (...), I took on the colour of our paths". When 11 November came, the writer shared the regrets of the cavaliers – there was not a complete victory, the disorganised enemy army was not pursued. He was also disappointed by the application of the Treaty of Versailles: "Victory didn’t like us," he wrote in The Humiliated Children.

In the 1930s he broke away from his political circle. He lived in Palma de Mallorca with his family during the Spanish Civil War, which inspired his work, The Big Cemeteries under the Moon (1938), in which he criticised Franco and his partisans. In 1938, he left for Paraguay, then Brazil. He called the Vichy regime a "ridiculous farm dictatorship" and took the side of General de Gaulle.

He came back to France in 1945 and left for Tunisia, from which he returned to die in Neuilly in 1948.

Source : Jean Bastier, "Georges Bernanos, le dragon de 1914-1918" In Les écrivains combattants de la Grande Guerre, Giovanangeli éd., 2004, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 186/September 2008

Born on 30 January 1882, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the descendent of a Dutch colonial family that immigrated to the United States in the 17th century. A graduate of the prestigious Harvard University, he undertook a career as an attorney before going into politics in the footsteps of his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States from 1901 to 1909.

A rising star in the Democratic Party, his career began in 1910 when he was elected to the New York State Senate. In 1913, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President Woodrow Wilson. During World War I, he worked in favour of the development of submarines and supported the project for installing the North Sea Mine Barrage to protect Allied ships from attacks by German submarines.

He met Winston Churchill for the first time during an inspection tour in Great Britain and on the French front.

Put in charge of demobilization after the Armistice, he left his job at the Navy in July 1920. That same year, the Democrats’ defeat in the Presidential election issued in a long period in the political wilderness during which he contracted a disease that caused him to lose the use of his legs in 1921.

He returned to the political scene in 1928, when he was elected Governor of New York State. During his term, he undertook reforms in favour of rural areas and in social policy, notably setting up the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration to help the unemployed, reducing working hours for women and children and overseeing improvements to hospitals. He also exercised tolerance in terms of immigration and religion. His action was successful and was validated by his re-election in 1930.

In 1932, Roosevelt was nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidential election, basing his campaign on the New Deal, an economic recovery programme designed to put an end to the crisis that hit the country with the stock market crash of 1929. Elected with 57% of the votes, he implemented his economic recovery programme and fought against unemployment, reformed the American banking system and founded Social Security. While still fragile, the economy progressively recovered and Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936 and again in 1940.

As the situation deteriorated in Europe, he sought to break with the United States’ policy of isolationism and neutrality supported by the American Congress and public opinion. He first obtained the repeal of laws on the embargo on arms sales to the warring parties in September 1937 and then, in 1941, received authorisation from Congress for arms assistance to the Allies, without reimbursement. The Lend-Lease law, signed on 11 March 1941, enabled the Americans to supply the Allies with war materiel without intervening in the conflict directly. On 14 August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration defining the moral principles that were to inspire the establishment of a lasting peace and which was later to serve as the basis for the United Nations’ Charter (June 1945).

In the meantime, in the Pacific, relations between Japan and the Western Powers were deteriorating. The United States gave their support to China, opposed to Japan, by granting lend-lease and then, when Japan refused to withdraw from Indochina and China, the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands decided on an embargo over raw materials, while Japan’s assets in the United States were frozen. On 7 December 1941, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor, the largest American naval base in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the United States into the war.

In 1942, Roosevelt gave priority to the European front while containing the Japanese advances in the Pacific. The United States thus intervened alongside the British, first in North Africa (Operation Torch in November 1942), and then in Europe with landings in Italy and France.

During the conflict, he was one of the main players in the inter-ally conferences (Anfa in January 1943 for the choice of the next front in Europe and Germany’s unconditional surrender, Dumbarton Oaks in August-October 1944 to prepare the constituent meeting for the United Nations, Yalta in February 1945 to solve the problems of post-war Europe).

Roosevelt did not recognise General de Gaulle’s legitimacy and was wary of him because he saw him as an apprentice dictator. He was opposed to letting Free France take part in the United Nations so long as elections had not been held in France. Laval’s return to power in 1942 led the United States to recall its ambassador from Vichy and to open a consulate in Brazzaville. The American President successively supported Admiral Darlan – a notorious collaborator – then General Giraud – a clear Vichy loyalist – and tried to block the action of the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (French Committee of National Liberation) in Algiers, the leadership of which de Gaulle had firmly taken, relegating Giraud to strictly military tasks.

His idea of placing liberated France under American military occupation (AMGOT) never happened, as General Eisenhower had reassured de Gaulle, on 30 December 1943, “I will recognize no French power in France other than your own in the practical sphere.” As a gesture of appeasement and to satisfy the American press and public opinion that were very favourable to the General, he welcomed him to Washington in July 1944. But he did not officially recognise the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPFR - Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française) until October of 1944 and did not invite its head to Yalta in a sign that his mistrust was not totally assuaged.

On 7 November 1944, Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected to a fourth term in the White House. He died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage on 12 April 1945. In application of the American constitution, Vice-President Harry Truman succeeded him.

Nothing had prepared him to confront the war and join the Resistance. Yet at 25 Philippe Viannay became the undisputed leader of one of the main resistance movements in the north. We go back over the life of a freedom-loving man who was a pioneer in many areas.

In the galaxy of the great leaders of the French resistance, Philippe Viannay has a unique position. Although he directed Défense de la France (DF), a leading movement in the north, Philippe Viannay is less well known than many of his counterparts - Frenay, Bourdet or the Aubrac couple to name just a few. His young age - just 23 years old in 1940 - his refusal to go into politics after the war, the posthumous publication of his memoirs... all these elements go to explain this relative silence. Yet everyone who met him - in undercover night-time operations as in the Journalists Training Centre (CFJ), the Jean Moulin club or the Glénans centre - all keep a fond memory of a highly charismatic personality. Whatever his merits, we do not want to give idolising biographical details of this resistance fighter's life but rather explore the uniqueness of a prominent leader in the Army of shadows.

Philippe Viannay was born in 1917 in a conservative family: his father was close to Colonel de la Roque's PSF movement and his mother had a nobles of the robe background. He also felt that his family belonged to "an honourable bourgeoisie" that despised money while having a small amount of it. After a year of hypokhâgne at Louis-le-Grand secondary school, he began studying philosophy while considering the priesthood - a vocation he abandoned in 1938 to resume his studies at the Sorbonne.

After fighting bravely in 1940, he returned to Paris, determined as the saying goes "to do something". Indeed, in October 1940 he considered publishing an underground newspaper, an idea given him by the boss of a friend, Marcel Lebon. Backed by a former classmate, Robert Salmon, and a student he met in the Sorbonne, Hélène Mordkovitch, whom he married in 1942, he launched an underground newspaper, Défence de la France with the first issue being published on 14 July, 1941.

Can you escape from your roots? The answer to this question is neither black or white when considering Philippe Viannay's life. Coming from a conservative Catholic family background, in many ways his opinions reflected those of his upbringing. In fact, up to 1942, DF adopted a Petainist line, wrongly crediting Petain with resistant tendencies. Similarly, the apprentice philosopher built his fight on an ethical basis. He did not try to fight against the occupier militarily but mainly focused his efforts in calling for a moral uprising.

Simultaneously, Philippe Viannay moved away from his milieu. Far from blindly following Petain, he considered the fight against Germany as a burning priority. And thanks to Hélène Viannay, DF became a patchwork where rather right-wing bourgeoisie elements mingled with more left-wing Russian migrants.

Through his charisma, sense of organisation and open mind, Viannay then influenced the line taken by the movement. As he came to realise the obvious, the paper gradually abandoned Petain and supported de Gaulle after an initial Giraud period. Above all, DF gradually embraced the idea of an armed struggle, setting up corps-francs then maquis groups in Burgundy-Franche-Comté and Seine-et-Oise in particular. But he failed to win over fighting France. While getting funds that enabled him, among other things, to finance a false ID papers workshop, the movement was not a part of the National Council of the Resistance. Viannay was probably a much better organizer than he was a politician! In fact, he preferred in 1944 to fight in Seine-et-Oise - where he was severely wounded - than go to Paris to prepare the now open publication of Défense de la France / France Soir .

Albert Bernier, Philippe Viannay (centre) and Françoise de Rivière, the Seine-et-Oise maquis in August 1944.

©Fondation de la Résistance, AERI, coll. Défense de la France DR

Although a member of the Consultative Assembly, at the Liberation Viannay abandoned both his political career and France-Soir . However, anxious to train journalists who he had found lacked professionalism before the war, he set up the CFJ, invested in the newspaper France-Observateur, and created the Glénans nautical centre. In this he remained faithful to his ideas. While remaining interested in public affairs through the Union of the Socialist Left and the Jean Moulin club, he preferred to get involved in civil society - the common link between his clandestine commitment and his investments in calmer times in a restored Republic. He died in 1986, aged 69.

Olivier Wieviorka, author of Une certaine idée de la Résistance, Seuil, 1995, reprinted. 2010. In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 240/November 2013

In 1940, Gilbert Renault, alias Rémy, set up the biggest intelligence network in free France: the Confrérie Notre-Dame that was to carry out numerous actions in France. His biographer, historian Guy Perrier, talks about his actions, in particular in 1943.

Stunned by the collapse of 1940, Gilbert Renault, a devout Catholic close to the ideas of l'Action Française, a movement however that he was never to join, refused to admit France's defeat. Leaving his wife and four children behind, he left the town of Vannes and sailed for England where he joined general Charles de Gaulle, with whom he forged links of admiration and affection that were never to be broken despite their future differences. De Gaulle assigned him to the 2nd bureau, which was to become the  Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations (BCRA) led by colonel Passy, whose real name was André Dewavrin, who asked him to set up a network along the Atlantic seaboard, where the Kriegstnarine was harassing British ships.

Thus began a new life for this impulsive, eccentric and chivalrous adventurer, who had worked for a long time in film as a producer after taking up numerous other occupations. After numerous trips between England, occupied France and Spain, Remy soon had informants in every port. On 6 January, 1942, after visiting the Notre-Dame des Victoires church in Paris, he baptised his movement the Confrérie Notre-Dame (CND) whose success was to gain him "unprecedented prestige with the Intelligence Service" according to Sébastien Albertelli, author of Services Secrets de la France Libre.

The network became the largest network in free France, it processed and forwarded mail from several networks: the Civil and Military Organization (CMO), Libération-Nord, Fana (Communist). After a stay in France at the end of 1942, Rémy went back to London on January 11, 1943 and would not come back to France until the Liberation. It was at this time that he brought the Communist leader Fernand Grenier to meet General de Gaulle, an event with far-reaching consequences. For Remy, whose monarchist beliefs were totally contrary to those of the Communist Party, the fate of his country must transcend ideological divides!

While the Confrérie Notre-Dame continued its intelligence work, a serious event occurred that disrupted the activity of the network. On 6 October 1943, a CND agent, Parsifal, fell into the hands of the German Security Service, the Abwehr. He was interrogated by a Belgian collaborator, Christian Masuy, who submitted him to the bathtub torture. The agent could not bear it and revealed the names of important members of the network. This was a major blow to the Confrérie Notre-Dame.

Remy came up with a contingency plan to put his organisation back on track and wanted to return to France. But London believed that colonel Rémy was more useful in London to help prepare for the allied landings, as part of the Sussex plan which intended to use French soldiers on inter-ally missions. In England, Remy had the joy of spending Christmas 1943 with his wife at their small home in Elwood and hearing the message of support that he had recorded the day before being broadcast by the BBC and aimed at the resistance fighters imprisoned in France.

Named a Companion of the Liberation on 13 March 1942, Rémy was to become the proponent of a very unlikely cause after the Liberation: that of attempting to reconcile Gaullists, resistants of all persuasions and anti-German petainists! He became a militant of the Gaullist RPF (Rally of the French People) in the aftermath of the war. He defended the idea, refuted by most historians, that general de Gaulle and Pétain were complementary, the first representing 'the sword of France' and the second 'the shield'. An assertion expressed in several of his books devoted to his action in the resistance, but that de Gaulle himself refuted without however this harming their friendship and the esteem de Gaulle had for him.

On 28 July, 1984, Rémy, the No 1 secret agent for free France passed away, a few days short of his 80th birthday. François Mitterrand, President of the Republic, hailed him as "one of the most glorious heroes of the Resistance, who will forever remain the honour of France". Two years after his death his last book was published, simply entitled: La Résistance.

Guy Perrier, historian, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 235/april 2013

Despite being a renowned historian, the resistance activities of Marc Bloch, arrested in March 1944 by the Gestapo and shot with 29 others on 16 June in Saint-Didier de Formans, are not well known. Historian Laurent Douzou tells of the undercover action of this committed intellectual, from 1943 up to his death.

"We should focus more than we do on how academics die when they do not die of illness or old age" wrote the philosopher Georges Canguilhem about Marc Bloch, whose extraordinary reputation as a historian has sometimes obscured the active role he played during the Occupation.

A Professor at the Sorbonne and co-founder of the Annals of Economic and Social History, Bloch was a scientific luminary when war broke out. As he entered into the prime of life, he already had one work to his credit. He had also come under fire during the great war that he came out of with the Military Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre.

Aged 53 in 1939, this father of six asked to fight. Responsible for fuel supplies for the 1st army, he fulfilled his mission but noted with amazement that the building he believed to be solid was in fact very weak. In an analysis written in the summer of 1940 and published in 1946 under the title The Strange Defeat, he dissects the levels of responsibility for this disaster without trying to exonerate himself: "I belong to a generation that has a bad conscience. It is true that we came back very tired from the last war. Also, after these four years of fighting idleness, we were looking forward to going back to our jobs and taking up the tools of our various trades, tools now attacked by rust: we wanted to go all out and make up for the lost work. Those are our excuses. I no longer believe that they are sufficient to free us of blame".

Moved by the status of the Jews in October 1940, Marc Bloch was expelled from his position as Professor seconded to the University of Strasbourg, which had fallen back to Clermont-Ferrand. Under Article 8, which provided exemptions for individuals who had rendered exceptional services to France, he was reinstated in January 1941 and assigned to Montpellier in July. He refused to use the visa he had obtained for the United States because he would not leave his friends and family. He served in Montpellier until he was dismissed on 15 March 1943.

On this date, his peaceful medievalist life of toil took a radical turn. By going headlong into the resistance, Marc Bloch became "Narbonne" by making contact with Franc-Tireur. Georges Altman, leader of this movement, told of this encounter: "I can still remember that charming instant when Maurice [Pessis], one of our young friends in the underground, his 20-year old face red with joy, introduced me to his "new recruit", a fifty year old gentleman with military decorations, a finely sculpted face under a head of greying hair, a sharp look behind his spectacles, his briefcase in one hand, a cane in the other, rather ceremonial at first, my visitor soon smiled at me reaching out his hand and said kindly: Yes, I'm Maurice's "young colt"...

This precious testimony suggested what this plunge into the underground movement might have represented for the academic Marc Bloch where starting afresh he had to prove his worth just like any other beginner. Everything he then had to do was a break with his former life Georges Altman noted: "And we soon came to see the Sorbonne Professor share this gruelling "street dog" life that was the underground Resistance in our cities with amazing composure." "Maurice's colt" was quickly entrusted with tasks to match his talents. He worked on the Political Journals for the General Studies Committee and the Free Review, published by Franc-Tireur. These publications bear his mark, in particular this methodical table of the articles from the first year of the Political Journals in issue 5 in January 1944!

In July 1943, Marc Bloch became one of the three members of the regional directorate of united resistance movements, a position that was both exposed and strenuous. Aware of the danger, effective and determined, "Narbonne" asserted himself as a legitimate and respected leader in the small but demanding world of the underground. His arrest by a well-informed Gestapo, on the morning of Wednesday, March 8, 1944, on Boucle Bridge in Lyon shocked his comrades. Tortured on the premises of the military health school, interned in Montluc prison, Marc Bloch was shot on 16 June 1944 with 29 other resistance fighters in Saint-Didier-de-Formans.

Laurent Douzou, historian, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 234/march 2013

A leading figure in the French Resistance, an ethnologist and writer, Germaine Tillion drew lessons from her experience of World War II that served her throughout her entire life. At all times she managed to combine testimony, reflection and action.

Germaine Tillion was born on 30 May 1907 in Allègre in Haute-Loire. In 1919, the family moved to the Paris region. During the twenties, she began to study ethnology and obtained a scholarship to study the Berber population in the Algerian Aures region in 1933. Between 1934 and 1940, she stayed with the Chaouias for four long periods and continued to write her thesis.

Back in France, on 9 June 1940, after the Armistice, she decided that "something had to be done". In the company of Paul Hauet, a retired colonel, she began her resistance activities under the cover of an association to help prisoners of war, the National Union of Colonial Combatants. This cell came into contact with similar groups, such as the one at the Musée de l'Homme, bringing together other ethnologists with Boris Vildé at the head. It was in 1946, when Germaine Tillion took care of getting administrative approval for the network, that she gave it the name "Network of the Musée de l'Homme", in tribute to the majority of its founders. The Group had numerous activities: collecting information to be passed on to London, taking care of escaped soldiers or organising prison breaks, sheltering English paratroopers, making false ID papers, spreading calls to combat, eradicating traitors and Gestapo agents.

Even though she was a dedicated patriot, Germaine Tillion never forgot one guiding principle to which she adhered at all times: dedication to truth and justice. In a note to the underground press, she observed that a lot of information concerning the situation at the time was circulating in French society but was contradictory because it came from different sources. She directed her fellow resistants to not skew the truth, to not hide anything, to strive to understand and to judge impartially. "In terms of ideas, at the outset we only know one cause that is dear to us, that of our homeland, it is for love of it that we have come together, to try to preserve its faith and hope." But in no way, in absolutely no way do we want to sacrifice the truth to it, because our homeland is dear to us only on one condition, that we do not sacrifice the truth to it".

An initial denunciation led to the arrest of several members of the Musée de l'Homme cell; in April 1941, a second betrayal led to the arrest of its remaining members. They were tried a year later, in February 1942. Ten people, including several close friends, were sentenced to death. Germaine Tillion, who escaped these arrests, struggled to get them reprieved but in vain: the seven men in the group were shot and the three women deported. She herself was arrested in the street in August 1942 by the German police after being betrayed by a French priest posing as a resistant. Detained for more than a year in the French La Santé and Fresnes prisons, she was deported to the Ravensbrueck camp in October 1943. She was freed in April 1945.

After returning to France, she devoted most of her time to the history of the Resistance and Deportation and published several works on these themes. However, she did not neglect her civic commitments and took part in the campaign against the camps that is still in operation in the communist countries in Europe and Asia.

In 1954, she was sent by the French government as an observer to Algeria, where the insurgency was getting under way. At first, she proposed strengthening the education given to the indigenous population (boys and girls, children and adults) to enable them to emerge from the poverty that economic development had failed to stem. As the conflict intensified, in 1957, Germaine Tillion devoted all her efforts to mitigating the effects of the violence: she campaigned against torture, executions and met with FLN leaders to convince them to stop indiscriminate attacks.

Elected studies director at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1958, she spent the following decades studying North African societies. She also published a new reviewed edition of Ravensbrück, her book about Deportation. She died on 19 April 2008 aged 100. Her autobiographical work, Fragments of Life, was published the following year.

Tzvetan Todorov - President of the Germaine Tillion association. In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 241/december 2013

Resistant in 1940, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the only woman recognized as the head of a large French resistance network, the Alliance network. Michèle Cointet, her biographer, tells of her extraordinary journey.

Marie-Madeleine Bridou escaped from the conformism of the bourgeois background she was born into in 1909. She lived with her two children in Paris, far from her husband Edward Méric, an Indigenous Affairs officer in Morocco. She divided her time between "Radio-Cité" and Commander Loustaunau-Lacau's General Secretariat of anti-communist and anti-German publications. Loustaunau-Lacau was the founder of the Corvignolles network and La Spirale and the person who initiated her into undercover activities. The love of a mythical homeland gained from a childhood in Shanghai where her father was the General Maritime Messaging Agent and... "honourable correspondent" and a lack of illusions about Marshal Petain inspired her in June 1940 to believe that since the men had put down their weapons, it was up to the women to take them up.

However she let herself be convinced to follow Loustaunau-Lacau in Vichy drawn by a general delegation to the powerful French Legion of combatants. A network centered on Marseilles and Vichy was set up which proved fertile ground from which to recruit officials from ministries and patriotic officers. The break with Vichy was not long in coming when Admiral Darlan expelled Loustaunau-Lacau from the Legion in February 1941. Developments in the war offered them an opportunity to engage actively against Hitler. Indeed, submarine warfare threatened the survival of the British. Getting information on submarine departures from Lorient was vital. Only the French could provide this. In April 1941, contact was established in Lisbon where Loustaunau-Lacau got money and a first transmitting station, the most effective weapon to get round the several weeks delay with conventional mail and finally enabling an immediate response. Alliance owned up to 17 of these stations. Since Marie-Madeleine's cover was not blown, unlike Loustaunau-Lacau in Paris, she organised the Alliance network in the north and west proclaiming loyalty to England and equality among partners. The Germans called it "Noah's Ark" because of the animal nicknames adopted by its members.

Arrested in Algiers in May 1941, Loustaunau-Lacau was found guilty then handed over to the Germans. Marie-Madeleine concluded from this event that it was best to refuse to make political commitments and this led some members who wanted to have closer ties with General de Gaulle, such as General Alamichel, to put some distance between themselves and Marie-Madeleine. Driven by her companions, she took over from Loustaunau-Lacau using a neutral signature: POZ 55. Since the results were exceptional, the British eventually acknowledged her, finally unveiled, as the head of the military intelligence network, the only one to benefit from this status in Europe. A great organizer, authoritative, rigorous, a natural leader and bold, she had enough mental flexibility to follow the advice of the British to decentralise the network into sub-networks such as Sea Star or Georges Lamarque's remarkable Druids.

Alliance recruited heavily among civil servants and was unique in  another way: 24% of members were women, making it the resistant organisation with the strongest female presence. Alliance played its greatest role in the Battle of the Atlantic providing information on train operations (German transports to the east), the first information about the V1 and V2 testing at Peenemunde through Amniarix (Jeannie Rousseau), records of launch pad operations in north-western France and a detailed map of the Atlantic defences. Marie-Madeleine organised General Giraud's submarine departure from Lavandou on 4 November, 1942 to Algiers to facilitate the Allied landing there.

She was held up in England following the arrest of her assistant Faye in September 1943 but got to return to France in July 1944 and, after escaping from a German barracks, carried out intelligence missions ahead of Patton's army.

Sensitive to the material and moral suffering of the members of her hard-hit network, 431 were killed i.e. one third of the total, she spent over twenty years caring for the survivors and their families. She published memories in the form of a memorial entitled Noah's Ark and defends the memory of the Resistance as Chairwoman of the Resistance Action Committee. With her husband, Free French fighter Hubert Fourcade, she helped return General de Gaulle to power in 1958. She was neither a political party icon nor anti-fascist activist and remained faithful to her idea of the Resistance: an efficient patriotic struggle against Nazi Germany.

Michèle Cointet, University Professor Emeritus, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 239/october 2013

For more information:

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade-Un chef de la Résistance, éd. Perrin, 2006.

“Mort pour la France”

Louis Pergaud was born on 22 January 1882 in Belmont, in the Doubs department. Son of a lay schoolteacher, he spent his childhood in small villages, exploring the countryside and trout fishing with his buddies. A brilliant student, he was admitted to the École Normale in 1898 and was appointed schoolteacher at Durnes in October 1901. The death of his two parents in February and March of 1900 was a great shock to the young man, which he got over by reading the poems of Léon Deubel, inspiring his literary passion.

In 1902, he did his military service, which left him with bad memories; his marriage to Marthe Caffot in 1903 was a failure and his daughter died in 1904. At the same time, his militant Republicanism caused him some problems with the population, leading to his transfer to Landresse at a time when the relations between the Church and Republican schools were extremely tense. Louis Pergaud was dissatisfied with life and withdrew into hunting and walking, awaking the scents of his childhood, and discussions with friends, including the extravagant café owner, Duboz. He soon fell in love with one of his daughters, Delphine. Léon Deubel, who had helped him get his first collection of poems published in 1904, asked him to come and join him in Paris.

Pergaud decided to change his life. He moved to the capital in 1907 and had Delphine join him and he married her after his divorce. Léon Deubel supported him in his desire to write. To make a living, he went back to his profession of schoolteacher and during his holidays he gathered material for his works. Louis Pergaud immediately became a figure in the literary world: he received the Prix Goncourt in 1910 for his first book, De Goupil à Margot, which met with great success.

In 1912, he published The War of the Buttons, the novel of my twelfth year. On the backdrop of the rivalries between two villages, the author uses sometimes fierce humour to develop subjects that were dear to him: country life, parochialism, the quarrels between the church and the secular state, etc. For Pergaud, 1913 was a happy period with the success of his novel Miraut the Hunting Dog, but it was also painful due to Léon Deubel’s suicide.

A naturalist writer, Pergaud used rich, dense writing to create a hymn to life that is still wild, with an innovative side in seeking out empathy with animals. He revisited his rural world, preparing several texts that he sent to Mercure de France in the spring of 1914 under the title Les rustiques. The book had not yet been published when Louis Pergaud was mobilised. War broke out on 2 September. With recruitment roll number 2216 in Belfort, he was assigned as a sergeant to the 166th Infantry Regiment at Verdun. “A pacifist and antimilitarist, I did not want the Kaiser’s boot more than any other boot rammed onto my country.”  (1)

He reached the front in October, in the Woëvre sector of the Meuse, a damp region whose hills saw fierce fighting. His correspondence deplored "bedroom patriots", describing the courage of the "poilus" – the French soldiers – the mud in the trenches and ever-present death. The childhood fights between the Lebrac gang and the Aztec gang of Les Gués, the heroes of The War of the Buttons, took on the mortal dimension of an adult conflict.

Second lieutenant Louis Pergaud (centre).

In the spring of 1915, the French launched an offensive in the Hauts de Meuse. During the night of 7 April, Second Lieutenant Pergaud’s company set out from Fresnes-en-Woëvre, attacking hill 233 in the direction of Marchéville. Near the enemy trenches, under the pouring rain, the soldiers met with intense gunfire. Louis Pergaud’s section was decimated, the survivors hid and then withdrew in the early morning. No one ever saw the writer again. Some of the men said he was wounded. German stretcher-bearers may have retrieved him and transported him to a trench while waiting to be able to evacuate him. But to take the Les Éparges Ridge, hill 233 had to be taken: the next day, the French artillery pounded the area, destroying the entire landscape, forever burying the men in this land, without distinction.

On 4 August 1921, a judgement by the court of the Seine, Louis Pergaud, who had disappeared, was declared “Mort pour la France” (Dead for France) on 8 April 1915 at Fresnes-en-Woëvre. He was one of the 1,160 soldiers who died or disappeared from the 166th Infantry Regiment during the year 1915. There is no tomb, but his books carry on the memory of this writer and his broken destiny.

Commemorative plaque, 3 rue Marguerin, Paris 14e. Source: © Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

(1) Letter to Lucien Descaves, March 1915.